1908] Winston Churchill's Wedding 213 



He is himself, he said, member of a wealthy landowning family in the 

 Sherkieh Province, and would try what could be done. 



" 4th Sept. — Eddy Hamilton is dead. This would have meant a 

 great deal to me twenty-five years ago, but he has long been practi- 

 cally defunct, paralysed, and mentally decrepit. Sackville also has 

 dropped out at the ripe age of eighty-one, a thoroughly good fellow, 

 with whom I was never intimate, but always friends. He had a hale 

 old age, a quiet, good man, whom I should regret more were I not 

 myself among the dead. 



" yth Sept. — E. V. Lucas and his wife were here to-day with Dr. 

 Philpot, and Belloc in the afternon. Lucas tells me that Harmsworth 

 now controls the whole policy and writing of the ' Times.' A copy of 

 the ' Times ' is annotated by him, with remarks, every morning. His 

 sole object now is to restore its character for respectability. This was 

 just what I recommended six months and more ago, when Eddy Ten- 

 nant was interested in it. 



" nth Sept. — The Poet Laureate (Alfred Austin) arrived from 

 Swinford to-day, and we have had much talk about politics and re- 

 ligion. He is sensible enough when one gets him alone. We dis- 

 cussed Modernism and the Eucharistic Congress, his position towards 

 the Church being much the same as mine. He has never renounced 

 Catholicism, he says, though he does not believe in any religion, but 

 he has leanings once more towards it now he is getting old. For me, 

 as I get older I care less. Austin is seventy-five. We first met about 

 the year '58, or it may be a little later, when he was reading law in 

 London. A little cock sparrow of a man, he was already with an 

 ambition of becoming Poet Laureate; it is astonishing he should have 

 won to it. His uncle left him some money, enough to live upon, and 

 he abandoned the Law after making once the Northern Circuit. Then 

 he travelled in Italy, became interested in Garibaldi, and married in 

 1865. In 1870, being at Berlin during the war, the ' Standard ' took 

 him on as its correspondent, and he followed the German army to 

 Versailles as such. He had a chance interview with Bismarck which 

 made his journalistic fortune, and from that time was kept on as 

 leader writer on the paper for its foreign affairs. This brought him 

 into connection with Lord Salisbury who eventually made him Laureate. 

 So are poets made, fit non nascitur, but he takes himself very seri- 

 ously now, attributes Bismarck's confidences to a poem of his the great 

 man had read in praise of Prussia, and Salisbury's choice of him to 

 his acknowledged position at the head of English literature. 



" 12th Sept. — To London for the Winston-Clementine wedding. It 

 was quite a popular demonstration. Lord Hugh Cecil Winston's best 

 man, and the great crowd of relations, not only the Church [St. 

 Margaret's] full, but all Victoria Street, though that may have partly 



